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JAPAN DOES IT AGAIN!

So this is a thing. Iwao Hakamada is now going to trial again. I have read in moderate outsider's detail about the legal system in Japan, and the fact that it is a festering pile of shit basically designed to prosecute, not establish truth.

That makes Japan's legal system the very antithesis of the ideal of innocent until proven guilty. You're guilty until the police get a confession out of you ( and by the way, have fun trying to get a defence lawyer, as they can't sit in on police interviews to advise you ).

The more I have learned about Japan over the years the more batshit crazy the country has seemed, and not in an endearing way anymore. Where previously I was drawn to this metropolitan, civilised, powerful and fascinating country on the far side of Eurasia, now I am horrified by an officialdom that is comfortable with no accountability for the systems it sustains, and thus the wanton inhumanity of those systems.

And I'm not the only one. Hiroyuki Okon is an economist in Japan whose views align with the Austrian School and libertarianism, which to me just blows the fucking idea that somehow Japan is unique out of the water. It's a country of people who wanna eat, poop, exchange with one-another, create, and live with dignity, and that's the end of the god-damned news.

So, a dude has a chance at a retrial, and God knows, maybe even being freed if he's found innocent. In prison he is addressed by number, not name. All because the finger was pointed at him in 1966 for the murder of a factory owner, that owner's wife, and their two children. One wonders how the accusation came about. Well, he confessed. Then a trio of judges sentenced him to death.

Why did he confess if he, and apparently others too, are now saying he didn't do it? Does it have anything to do with the insane practice mentioned in my 2nd paragraph above. Wikipedia's article on the man states;

Hakamada was interrogated and, in August 1966, was arrested based on a confession and a pair of pajamas he owned that featured a tiny amount of blood and gasoline. According to his lawyers, Hakamada was interrogated a total of 264 hours, as many as 16 hours a session, over 23 days to obtain the confession. They added that he was denied water or bathroom breaks during the interrogation. [ Japan Times article]

So is everything about the criminal justice system in Japan, as da kids say these days, full of shit? Did the guy even do what he's in jail for? How many others have died for crimes they didn't commit? How many more human beings have to be made sacrificial lambs for the mincer of Japanese judicial process?

Do read the links in the order in which they appear please. Finding the right comments in the third link might be quite interesting. They are all by a user called BestTrousers and start with "RI" meaning R1.

The main argument used by HealthcareEconomist3 is to give a survey of several works, while BestTrousers goes for comparative advantage.

Hopefully you good folks can indulge me by forgiving this post. It is an unfinished mess because I wanted it out there as the anchor for a hyperlink from a Reddit thread.At the momebt everything below is a jumble of notes, but I will be reworking it bit by bit starting today.Hopefully this post will be sorted out and typed in full before the end of April 2017.

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Historical materialism is the idea that history progresses in stages - slavery, then feudalism, then capitalism, then socialism, then communism - driven by changes in the technologies or techniques of production, and that any human civilisation will exemplify this process.

This makes historical materialism an exercise in both historicism and materialism.

Historicism is the idea that studying the past can reveal history's in-built course or narrative, and so show you the future.

Materialism is the idea that ideas ( and institutions) ultimately* don't matter in determining our destinies, and that therefore only material…

The idea that labor exploits capital is equally as plausible, sans assumptions*, as the idea that capital exploits labor. This is only intended as a response to the formal concept, descriptive or normative, of exploitation in Marx's schema from Capital Volume I.

* Assumptions include the power relation whereby capital is just assumed to be above labor hierarchically.

~ ~ Capital exploits labor because...
... Capital earns income from production done by labor that capital didn't perform
& ~ Labor exploits Capital because...
... Labor earns income from capital that labor didn't buy~
Basically in good old formal logic fashion both of those cases above, being factual descriptions, are true at once or are false at once.